Vaughn A. Booker

Vaughn A. Booker is the George E. Doty, Jr. and Lee Spelman Doty Presidential Associate Professor of Africana Studies. He comes to Penn from Dartmouth College, where he was Associate Professor of African & African American Studies and Religion. Booker is a historian of religion whose scholarship and teaching center twentieth-century African American religions. He focuses on people who engage in practices of (re)making simultaneously religious and racial identities, communities, and forms of authority. His teaching interests, which incorporate intersectional approaches, include Black religion and culture during Jim Crow, religion and the Civil Rights movement, contemporary Black religious/spiritual memoirs, religion and mourning/memorialization, and modern Black religious/spiritual communities.